A classic Japanese film with the most haunting musical score ever

Mizoguchi's 1953 classic, Ugetsu, is another one of the great post-war Japanese movies that seems extremely old and quaint today - but then of course we realize that it seemed old and quaint even in its day, as it's set in rural 16th-century Japan, during an era of war among various shogun clans. The focus is on two men, and their spouses, who see the ongoing war as an opportunity: one of the men, a potter, recognizes that he can get a high price for his wares and sets off for a nearby city to cash in on the wartime economy; the other man wants to become a samurai warrior and gain social status as well as wealth. Obviously, both fail in their quests, with disastrous, even tragic consequences. The film is great in part because of how well Mizoguchi establishes the sense and feeling of life in this distant era - both in the small village, in the countryside, and in the crowded city, with its bustling outdoor bazaars. Particularly of note: the beautiful scenes in which the two men and their wives (and one child) cross a lake on a foggy night to bring the wares to the city. The film also has by far the strangest, most mysterious score I've ever heard, haunting the movie throughout. And it's also a ghost story - and Mizoguchi weaves the supernatural elements through threads of his realistic narrative, so that we're constantly off-balance, not knowing which elements of the plot are natural, which are supernatural. It's impossible to see this film and not think about life in postwar Japan in the 50s, a society still impoverished and full of ruins - much like the 16th-centural landscapes that Mizoguchi creates, and no doubt full of stories similar to this one, of husbands who abandoned wives in search of wartime profiteering, of would-be warriors who had hoped to be lifted from poverty and whose dreams were ruined, and of soldiers far from home who forgot their families and began new lives.